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That said, though, filmmakers often have trouble with the lower-middle-class experience of growing up. If there's a token monosyllabic father sitting on a ratty armchair in front of the tube, a can of Schlitz in his hand, they feel they've done their duty to signal the bleakness of working-class family life. It's as if the kid, or kids, in question hardly matter, as long as the all-important class distinction has been drawn in fat marker.

Outside Providence Directed by Michael Corrente Starring Shawn Hatosy, Alec Baldwin and Amy Smart

Michael Corrente's wonderful "Outside Providence" -- its script written by Corrente and Bobby and Peter Farrelly (directors of "Dumb & Dumber" and "There's Something About Mary"), from a novel by Peter Farrelly -- is about class, all right. But the movie is remarkable for the way it refuses to treat a lower-middle-class upbringing as a tragedy or as something to apologize for. Its lead character, hapless but good-hearted burnout Timothy Dunphy (Shawn Hatosy), doesn't see his place in the social food chain as a roadblock to overcome: It's simply there, an unremarkable fact. In an early sequence, Corrente shows us Timothy's younger brother, Jackie (Tommy Bone), in a wheelchair delivering papers; he's being pulled by Timothy, who's riding a bike, the two of them zipping past a row of those faceless clapboard houses, their three-legged German shepherd mutt (with an eyepatch, no less) ambling merrily in tow. Wheelchair, dismal dwellings, three-fourths of a dog: Corrente gives us this checklist right up front, so we'll know what we're in for. He wants us to laugh; what isn't welcome is our pity.

"Outside Providence" has a spiritual kinship with Tamara Jenkins' "Slums of Beverly Hills," although it's not nearly as cartoonish as that picture. It recognizes that the class a kid is born into has everything to do with how he or she grows up; it doesn't try to ameliorate class differences in the service of making some pat "Adolescence hurts, no matter how much money you've got" statement. And it does feature a father, played by Alec Baldwin, who slumps in front of the tube in a ratty armchair. But Baldwin's character, as broadly drawn as he is -- the movie is a comedy, after all -- isn't a token. None of the central characters, the rich ones included, have been plunked into the movie just to make a point. Maybe that's what gives "Outside Providence" a kind of richness that goes above and beyond its ostensibly depressing setting. It's funny and offbeat, sometimes raucous, but it still manages to come at you in gentle layers.

The '70s have turned out to be the most popular era covered in the movies lately, but Corrente transports us effortlessly not just into an era that's past, but into a whole way of life for kids of a certain age in a certain kind of town: Early on we see Timothy and his stoner buddies hanging out one night at a local water tower, talking about girls and drugs and not much else, in a way that's eminently not meaningful. You can't even say these kids' lives have a texture: Their days just seem to wash over them, culminating in these evening episodes where recent events are mined feebly as if they might have some potential meaning, or might be some means of effecting change -- but probably not. Change ends up grabbing Timothy by the scruff of the neck: Content enough to go through life getting high and helping his kid brother deliver papers, he gets into deep trouble when (high, of course) he crashes his father's car -- straight into a parked cop cruiser. "Old Man Dunphy" (Baldwin), hoping to straighten his kid out, manages to get him into a swanky prep school -- not realizing, of course, that by removing Timothy from his deadbeat gang, he's really just swapping one group of stoners for another. Timothy quickly finds his crowd at school (turns out the stoners of superior breeding have fashioned a giant bong out of some water tank-type thing), and he even manages to land Jane Weston (Amy Smart), an upper-crusty but marvelously down-to-earth young woman, as his girlfriend.

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